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Studio: |
Sierra
On-Line |
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Designer(s): |
Jim
Walls |
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Part of series: |
Police
Quest |
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Release: |
December 1987 |
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Main credits: |
Programming: Greg Rowland, Al Lowe, Scott Murphy Music: Margaret Lowe |
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Useful links: |
Playthrough:
Complete
Playlist Parts 1-5 (277 mins.) |
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Basic Overview
I mean, let’s face it: even today, something like 90% of all
video games (amounting to 100% if you confine yourself to action-based
titles) take place in imaginary worlds, occasionally inspired by mythology or
even real human history, but even then, still striving to accentuate the
fantastic, supernatural, otherworldly aspects of the environment. And while
the main reason behind this is that video games continue to satisfy our
craving for escapism, idealism, and self-aggrandizing (what other medium lets you step into the
shoes of Superman with that much ease?), an important secondary reason is
that «real life» is just so goddamn hard to program without it looking like a
lame parody on real life. With all the huge technical and substantial
progress made in video games over almost half a century now, we are still
quite far from successfully modeling the actual environment in which we live;
even simulations such as Grand Theft
Auto still have to rely on satire, parody, and elements of absurdism to
mask the fact that Los Santos is not
Los Angeles, at least not when you’re trying to do more than simply cruise around
the town without a purpose. Still, every once in a while some people made small, brave,
risky steps to help bring about a solution to this problem — and it was quite
an important step in this direction when Ken Williams, over a game of
racquetball and an aftergame drink, offered Jim Walls, a retired Californian
police officer, to design a video adventure game based on his own past
experiences in the service of law and order. Even if, back in 1987, Jim’s
very profession was still a long ways away from becoming one of the most
despised in progressive circles (though already getting there), we may still
be underestimating the degree of risk Ken was taking with such a proposal —
not only was he offering an important job at Sierra to somebody who had no
prior experience whatsoever with video games or even computers as such, but
he was actually offering him to make a realistic
game, set in actual America and reflecting daily life events more or less as
they would happen in daily life. This would certainly be a daring first in
the history of Sierra, or, in fact, videogaming as such. To make matters even more difficult, neither Ken nor Jim wanted
to have a videogame equivalent of Miami
Vice on their hands. Like any seasoned police officer, Walls knew
perfectly well that 90% of a cop’s life is spent in a state of dreary
routine, and the challenge set before him was dire indeed — immerse the
player into an environment that would reflect a real day in the life of a
real police officer as close as possible, yet somehow manage to not entirely
bore the player the same way an actual police officer would probably be bored
on the job. The game had to combine crime-fighting adventure and thrill with
the everyday craft of going through one’s work duties; above all else, the game
also had to have educational value, teaching players the importance and
morality of following proper police procedure at all times. To make a game
like this and get away with it, even in 1987, when critical opinion was
generally more forgiving toward the fresh new medium, seemed like a
near-impossible task — yet somehow, Jim and his team managed to at least not fall flat on their faces. Police Quest: In Pursuit Of
The Death Angel was no masterpiece; it was rarely, if ever, greeted as one upon
release, and up to this day, the game itself and the overall series which it
initiated remains a bit of a dark horse — or a bit of a black sheep, if you
will — in the Sierra catalog. With its near-total lack of plot, puzzles whose
proper solution depended more on reading police manuals than creative
thinking, and a completely blank-slate protagonist, it was closer in spirit
to the early King’s Quest games
with their rather mechanical adaptation of clichéd fairy tale motives
than to, say, Space Quest or Leisure Suit Larry — games that at
least tried to be somewhat original
and unpredictable. Today, even if you attempted to remake Police Quest in outstanding 4K
graphics with ray tracing and sugar on top, rewriting all of its dialog and
hiring top voice actors, you would not be able to come up with a market-ready
product; and I am not even mentioning the «good cop» theme, which would never
fly with today’s gamers. (Interestingly, Jim Walls attempted to raise some
money on Kickstarter back in 2013 for a new game series that would be a
«spiritual successor» to Police Quest
— and predictably failed). Even so, back in 1987–88 the game managed to sell moderately
well and even get some good reviews
— not just because it presented a sort of un-lacquered portrayal of a cop’s
daily life, but, I think, precisely because it was one of the first
adventure-style simulators of life in a realistic American city. You could
(and sometimes were, in fact, forced to) simply cruise the streets of
«Lytton», looking for action (and usually not getting any), years before Grand Theft Auto made such cruising a
hundred times as efficient. The universe of Police Quest was, in many ways, more relatable than that of any
other Sierra series. But that was in 1987; the question, of course, is
whether there are any remaining reasons, other than purely historical, to get
any actual enjoyment from the game today.
Let us, then, spend a bit of time in pursuit of the Death Angel and try to
find what can be enjoyable about it. |
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Content evaluation |
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Believe it or not, there actually is a plot to Police Quest:
In Pursuit Of The Death Angel. It begins when you actually begin to
pursuit «The Death Angel», a cunning and deadly big-time drug dealer who goes
by the real name is Jessie Bains. Considering, however, that you do not get
to actively begin pursuing him until, let’s say, the final quarter or so of
the game (and that a large part of that pursuit will be spent losing at poker
with Jessie and his friends), it will not be much of an exaggeration to say
that Police Quest was the first
Sierra game into which you were dropped without any clear objectives other
than discover for yourself what it feels like to be a cop on active duty.
«Fiction» has very little place in this game. Given that art striving to imitate life, rather than the other
way around, tends to provoke reactions of boredom from the consumer, it would
be hard to expect the «storyline» of Police
Quest to be anything other than terminally dull. But Jim, Ken, and the
rest of the Sierra guys were very well aware of the problem at stake — the
challenge was to walk the thin line between the dry educational values of the
game and player entertainment. Whether they succeeded in rising up to it or
not was, and still is, up to the player to decide, but it certainly cannot be
said that they did not even try. Most of the game is divided into tiny «vignettes», each covering
a separate small incident in the routinely-busy life of a traffic (and later,
a drug) cop. Although, formally, Lytton City is construed as an open sandbox
— after the initial police briefing, you can just hop in your car and cruise
around every location in town — in reality there’s not much to do around
these locations until the game decides to turn one or another of them into
the background for another criminal development. As it is, like in real
police life, you just wait and do nothing until things start to happen. Sonny
investigates the consequences of a murder. Sonny writes a ticket for
speeding. Sonny makes a DUI arrest. Sonny admonishes a group of rowdy bikers.
Sonny relaxes with friends at a bar after work. Sonny apprehends a minor drug
dealer. Sonny prepares evidence for a no bail warrant for the minor drug
dealer — and so on. Each of the mini-stories is nothing special per se, but
each is also relatively short (unless you get stuck on issues of police
procedure, which we will discuss later), and the turnaround rate is
calculated very precisely, so that the entertainment quotient do not drop
below zero. Above all, Police Quest
tries to lure in with unpredictability — what exactly is going to happen to
Sonny Bonds in the next little
chapter? Can’t wait to find out. In a way, it actually helps that the game was made in 1987, when
digital technologies still forced creators to think in terms of projections
of «pseudo-realism», rather than trying to immerse the player into a
completely realistic situation. By today’s standards, the dialogs between
characters would have probably been interminable — and terminally boring —
and the mini-storylines would have been dragged out to horrendous lengths. In
real life, it probably takes a police officer at least 5-10 minutes to write
a ticket; in Police Quest, you can
do it within 30 seconds (provided you quickly understand the commands you
need to punch in). Simple, unsophisticated events deserve simple,
unsophisticated treatments, and this is precisely what you get; the overall
approach is very adequate to the purposes of the game. At the same time, Walls and his team do find ways of livening up
situations so that stuff does not get too
dry and procedural. Some of Sonny’s encounters have humorous or even
titillating notes — for instance, stopping a gaudy sports car for running a
red light leads the poor officer into a downright Leisure Suit Larry situation, where you can make a free choice
between following your duty or getting seduced by the gorgeous violator (yes,
there is a way here to fail in your
duties without having a premature... game
over. You just won’t get the full points). Interacting with drunk driver
«Art Serabian» and some of the other criminals can lead to some funny dialog.
The little inside jokes and sarcastic exchanges between Sonny and his cop
buddies, either down at the station or when they’re gathered together at some
drinking joint in town, are not exactly Wire-level
witticisms, but they do a good job of bringing the environment to life — in
the small way that the small environment genuinely deserves. In short, there is a bit of meat on these bones, even
if most of it really has more to do with atmosphere than actual plot. The other good side is the progression: although you do begin
life as a fairly lowly traffic cop, already reading the local newspaper at
the very beginning of the game gives you a subtle premonition of things to
come — a major anti-drug battle in your hometown — and even when your primary
occupation still consists of hunting down traffic violators, you occasionally
get glimpses into the activities of your chief future enemies, either through
your own activities (like investigating a crime scene where a minor drug
dealer was shot by a bigger fish) or through hearsay (like hearing the escort
lady, Sweet Cheeks Marie, first mention the «Death Angel» at the bar).
Eventually, Sonny moves into the big game, where the plot finally kicks off —
ironically, though, the game is probably at its weakest in its final stretch,
with the entire undercover operation at the Hotel Delphoria, where you expect
everything to get hot but in
reality spend most of the time playing poker. In any case, a lot of thought clearly went into that sequencing,
and that at least deserves respect. As to the total linearity of the plot,
for a game like Police Quest it
is, at the very least, logically justified — the very idea of the game is
that survival, efficacy, and success in the cop business is only possible if
everything is done strictly by the book. Deviate from proper police
procedure, or from a thorough and meticulous attitude towards your work, and
you are either dead (worst scenario) or get the «wrong» results that will
still carry you through the rest of the game, but with diminished returns
(points) — like, for instance, failing to obtain a no-bail warrant for your
pet prisoner will have him walking free through your own fault, whereas if
you do obtain the warrant, the
prisoner will simply escape jail on his own: same result under both
scenarios, but more points and personal satisfaction for you in the first
case, naturally. It should be noted, of course, that the «bad cop» element is
completely absent from the game — all of your cop buddies and your immediate
superiors are presented as loyal and honest workers, all of whom have their
human sides (some are grumbly, some play pranks on each other, some take a
bit too much time showering in the locker room) but none show anything even
close to «inhuman». But let’s get serious: nobody could ever expect a simple
veteran ex-cop design a game along the lines of frickin’ Serpico — certainly not if his
own experience in the force was generally more positive than negative. At
least the designers are absolutely relentless on the player if you ever try
to engage in an act of «police brutality» — you don’t even get to fire your
gun until the very last scene in the game (when it actually does it for you)!
I’m pretty sure that nobody back in 1987 even tried to analyze the game from
a «police-whitewashing» angle, and there is no use applying revisionist
practices to it now, either. Unless you think drunk drivers do not deserve
jail time, or drug pushers do not need to be prosecuted, there is really not
a single moment in Police Quest
that could be morally questionable from any other angle. (Well, there may be
a couple gay jokes here and there that wouldn’t sit too well with modern
sensitive audiences). Perhaps one somewhat
cringy bit of writing for the game involves «Sweet Cheeks Marie», introduced
midway through the story as Sonny’s old classmate turned hooker, who quickly
gets infatuated with her high school crush upon re-encountering him and
eventually achieves her own Mary Magdalenesque «redemption» after agreeing to
assist Lytton Police with the operation against the Death Angel. She is never
really given any specific motivation other than being taken in with Sonny’s
good looks, and the way things happen, you don’t even get to understand if
this unexpected love interest, being forced on the title character, is
genuinely affected by his warmth and kindness, or is simply using him for her
own safety. This is precisely the
moment where I’d like to have some choices — e.g. different reactions and
outcomes depending on Sonny’s treatment of the lady — and the way Bonds is
railroaded into romance feels poorly written and orchestrated. I certainly
hope this piece of the story isn’t autobiographical or anything, because if
this is how Jim Walls met his wife,
I wouldn’t envy the guy... |
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In pre-Internet days, the easiness of beating Police Quest depended exclusively on
one factor: whether your copy of the game was officially licensed, i.e. came
in its own box with the player’s manual, or whether you pirated it off a
friend and did not have a xeroxed copy of said manual. Well, either that or
you would have to be a police officer on active duty yourself. I still have
vivid memories from the late Eighties of how approximately half of the (still
relatively small) computer-endowed crowds in the city of Moscow — where, at
the time, pretty much all software
was pirated — ran around town, desperately trying to find out what it was
exactly that you were supposed to do with the drunk guy upon apprehending
him. "Cuff drunk"? "Arrest drunk"? "Beat shit out of
drunk?" "Insert nightstick in..." ...sorry, people would try anything out of sheer
desperation, until some wise man (or,
more likely, some guy with overseas connections) finally dropped the bomb on
the herd — "GIVE TEST",
people! (yep, in Soviet Russia, Field Sobriety Test administers you!). For those happy, civilized, progressive souls who did buy an officially licensed copy of
the game, becoming the proud owners of the Lytton Police Department
Policeman’s Indoctrination Guide (indoctrination!!),
beating the game would be a total cakewalk — provided they took the time to
study the manual, of course. Police
Quest is not a game about some particularly inventive, out-of-the-box
thinking cop, finding himself in unpredictable, unprecedented situations and
having to devise truly creative ways to get out of his predicaments. No, Police Quest was intentionally
designed as a game about an absolutely regular, ordinary cop — albeit
well-trained, professional, and courageous when necessary — who survives in
this world precisely because he does everything by the book, never even
thinking of resorting to extra-procedural means. Your name may be Sonny, but
you don’t even get to be Sonny Crockett, let alone Dirty Harry. As it is, the most difficult thing about pretty much every Police Quest game is not getting stuff
done, but getting stuff done just right
— for the maximum amount of points, that is. The actions you can take in any
of the situations that arise fall into three types: (a) lethal actions — decisions that either get you killed or, more
frequently, suspended from the force, which is pretty much the same thing for
the game’s purposes; (b) incorrect
actions — decisions or, more frequently, failures to make any decisions that
constitute forgivable violations of procedure and simply cost you game
points; (c) commendable actions —
like not forgetting to read your Miranda rights to every criminal you bag on
the streets. That’s about it. No "cornered in a dark basement and out of
ammo, you have to break off a piece of lead pipe and quickly fashion your own
bullets" type of actions for Sonny Bonds in the City of Lytton, where
nothing out of the ordinary ever happens. Subsequently, the game is all about disciplining your mind — it is more difficult, for instance, to
remember to always give a safety
check to your vehicle in the police yard than it is to figure out how to
intercept a drug deal in the park. Skip walking around your car even once
and, no matter how often you have done it in the past, you obligatorily end
up with a flat tire upon exiting the yard. This irritating circumstance is
always brought up by irritated reviewers of the game: just what exactly is
the bloody probability, they whine, of getting a flat tire in real life upon
forgetting to safety-check your car? couldn’t they at least have made it a random event? Such whining, however,
completely misses the point: one of Police
Quest’s actual goals was teach the player a bit of discipline — according
to Jim Walls, questions like "hey, who’ll ever know if I decide to not put my gun in the locker before
entering jail? just for once?" should never even begin to form in the
head of a correctly trained and responsible police officer, and even if in
real life you shall not always be
punished for such negligence, well, this is exactly what the game is here
for; in the virtual world, punishment for negligence is impossible to avoid. Yet while I am absolutely not against the disciplinary angle —
never personally found it too difficult to waste five extra seconds for the
prescribed walkaround, or to type in "open locker", "put
gun", "close locker"... ..."open locker", "take
gun", "close locker" when it’s a matter of life and death — I
do think that the game could do with at least a pinch more creativity when it
comes to battling criminals. Going over all of those mini-vignettes once
again, I found that pretty much the only
case when Sonny Bonds is required to use his head in addition to his manual
is when he has to collect enough evidence to convince the judge to issue a no
bail warrant for one of his drug clients. It’s not a particularly difficult
puzzle — all you really have to do is meticulously explore your own office —
but it is something you actually do on your own, and even responsible police
officers are sometimes left on their own, you know? Where this strategy really
crashes and burns, though, is in the game’s final segment, when Sonny, poorly
disguised as a pimp on holiday, has to infiltrate an illegal gambling scene
at the Hotel Delphoria, using his unrefusable girlfriend Sweet Cheeks Marie
as bait. At least here, it might seem, the designers could be allowed to
forego standard procedure and invent something creative to help our guy fool
the bad dudes and deal with the «Death Angel» in some extraordinary fashion.
Instead, your freedom of action is all but restricted to not one, but two rounds of deadly... POKER. Few
things are more irritable about early video games than that awful fixation on
poker — a card game that is exceptionally easy to program and absolutely not fun to play when it is completely
stripped of its psychological factor. It’s all reduced to random luck, which
is, of course, not in your favor something like 70% of the time, making it
impossible to beat the sequence without «scum-saving» after each win. But
what makes it even worse is the painful realization that you are finally out of your police uniform,
ready to unleash a bit of creative trickstery on your enemies... and you’re
stuck here playing friggin’ poker?
I’m pretty sure that quite a few players must have said "fuck that, I’m
outta here" at that point, never getting to reap the sweet satisfaction
of finally taking out Jessie Bains and watching that embarrassing kiss from
Sweet Cheeks Marie on the steps of the Lytton Courthouse. At least the game is reasonably well-programmed; the parser,
well evolved beyond the rough early days of King’s Quest, is able to recognize plenty of synonyms
(occasionally even short sentences when you find yourself in dialog
situations, such as "it’s an emergency" or "can I see your
license", etc.), and I do not remember ever getting stuck simply because
I had no idea how to issue a
command despite knowing perfectly well what
to issue. Disciplining myself with all the repetitiveness was a special kind
of fun, too (though I can understand how not
fun it can be for those who hate discipline or who think they already have
too much discipline in real life to go through with all that shit again in
the virtual one). But it also goes without saying that Police Quest is certainly not a game that will go down in history
because of the genius of its puzzles — and any game that forces poker down
your throat has quite a bit to answer for, just as well. |
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Atmosphere
But at least Jim Walls and his boys tried somehow to make Lytton into a place not entirely devoid of life.
Its coffeehouses and bars are full of people, with some of whom you can even
try to strike up a conversation (usually futile, but every once in a while
some funny dialog might pop up). Its jail yard is occupied by a nonchalant
black dude playing basketball all day long, while the cell next to the one in
which you bag your own prisoners is occupied by a mean-looking, bulky-hulky
software pirate (just as a friendly warning to all of us unscrupulous
Muscovites). And then, of course, there are all your buddies down at the
police station, who always have a snide or humorous remark to make or an
anecdote to tell whenever you brush past them (only once per each appearance,
though). The writing isn’t exactly comedy gold or anything (I’m pretty sure
they had Al Lowe come by and donate a couple of dirty jokes), but it does
enliven things a bit, providing pretty much the same kind of loose
distraction from writing tickets or administering FSTs all day long as it
prob’ly does in real life for real cops. The parser’s ability to understand input and the variety of
responses to that input are, as usual, pretty limited, but a step above most
of Sierra’s previous games, I would say. As a rule, each individual object
depicted in the game has its own verbal description, although lovers of the
stereotypical
«take-everything-that’s-not-nailed-down-and-shove-it-in-your-pocket» way of
adventuring will be sorely disappointed: most of your inventory can only be
gotten in the police station (as tools of the trade) or at crime scenes (as
evidence) — as a responsible police officer, you can’t even allow yourself a
glass of scotch at the bar, let alone pilfering Judge Palmer’s gavel or
Jessie Bains’ poker deck. But you can,
for instance, «take off your clothes»
just about anywhere you go! Even if it results in an immediate death from
embarrassment (as does walking out of the shower room dressed only in your
towel, for that matter — apparently, a cop’s moral integrity is every bit as
important as a cop’s dedication to proper police procedure). The one area in which the game totally fails, though, is in conveying any sense of danger or
tension. Whether intentionally or not, the city of Lytton ends up being a permanently
sunny, cozy, happy place, only occasionally disturbed by some petty
misdemeanor; even when there appears to be evidence of serious criminal
activity, usually drug-related, it seems to be coming out of nowhere — like,
why the hell would the perfectly adequate and satisfied schoolkids of Lytton
even turn to drugs in the first place? Your biggest dangers are related not
to dying in a firefight (there are only two occasions in the entire game when
you can do that, and only through the most shameful negligence on your part),
but to crashing your car through reckless driving in the streets, or failing
to understand the proper bureaucratic procedures and getting fired. Even in
that final stretch when you’re supposed to investigate the «seedy underbelly»
of the city, your gangster antagonists are a couple of clean, polite guys who
only want to play some poker, not stick needles under your thumbs or
anything. In short, all of us here who are weary of the world’s troubles,
instability, inflation, and environmental problems, would hardly mind moving
into the city of Lytton circa 1987, where the average storeowner’s most
common problem is having a bunch of bikers clog the parking lot with their Harleys,
and the few known criminals are not so much a threat to society as an amusing
diversion, adding a bit of spice to an otherwise paradisial existence (e.g.
"Short Fat Fanny", wanted for petty theft; "unusual traits: halitosis to the magnitude
equal to the breath of eight mules!", etc.). This is why, upon
finally beating the game, you don’t really feel a lot of moral satisfaction —
you do catch the arch-criminal, but
you don’t exactly get to see how, in the process, you have managed to make
the life of your fellow citizens any happier than it already is. Subsequent Police Quest
games, I believe, would take note of this issue — although the extra elements
of darkness in II and III would rather have to do with the
personal vendetta ongoing between Sonny Bonds and his enemies rather than
general justice and such (and Police
Quest IV, the darkest and grimiest game in the series, would be its own
beast altogether). Yet, in addition to reflecting the general infancy of
hardware and software technology, as well as the adventure game genre itself,
it is also possible that Police Quest
had no choice but to align, intentionally or not, with the still relatively
light tone of police action dramas and soaps of the late Eighties, being
essentially a product of its time. It might, in fact, have been a good thing
that Sierra went out of business by the time The Wire hit the screens, or else poor Jim Walls could get stuck
with the impossible task of throwing a big dose of existentialist Weltschmerz into the script. At least
nothing about the original Police
Quest gives you the idea that no sooner than you have bagged the «Death
Angel», there are three more around the corner just waiting to take his
place... |
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Technical features |
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Graphics
In fact, Police Quest
is pretty much the only Sierra game
I can remember at the moment that blatantly reuses part of its assets from
other games — the most obvious example being one of the random backdrops of
Lytton which «steals» the disco backdrop from Leisure Suit Larry, although I’m pretty sure some other elements
and sprites were pilfered as well. This is not really a big deal per se, but
it just goes to show how much they cared about this particular game. Like any random AGI-era Sierra game, it still looks reasonably
nice even today if you lower your expectations, but there’s simply not a lot
to go around. The general map of Lytton is a well-organized 2D projection
brimming with straight angles and rectangular shapes, while the actual
locations are usually restricted to one or two screens’ worth of interiors;
the most detailed depiction is, naturally, that of your own native police
station, but even that one is ergonomically and pragmatically designed. For
all of Lytton’s much-lauded «prosperity and growth» (talked about in the
newspaper that you are supposed to read at the beginning of the game),
business there kind of seems to still remain on late 19th century level... Also,
despite there having been some progress in making those games more vividly
come to life with the use of close-up images — most notably in Leisure Suit Larry, where Al Lowe
managed to realize that seducing the player with tiny sprites of pixelated
ladies just wasn’t going to cut it — Police
Quest makes almost no use of that advanced approach, leaving you in the
dark as to what Sonny Bonds or «The Death Angel» actually look like. The only
exception to the rule is Sonny’s incident with the Lady in the Red Sports
Car, most of which is essentially a Larry-themed
Easter egg, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the image of the lady
happens to be an outtake from Al Lowe’s game which Mark thought was too good
to throw away (even the eye-and-lip animations are done Larry-style, with «happy» and «angry» variations). Some players
and reviewers complained that Larry-style
images or plot sequences cannot belong in a Police Quest, but I dunno, anything
to make the game feel less monotonous... anyway, that’s pretty much it about
the graphics. |
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Sound There is not much to say about the role of sound in Police Quest because there is so
little of it, and what little there is typically ranges from annoyingly
bizarre to bizarrely annoying. All «music» is credited to Margaret Lowe, Al’s
wife, who seemingly had a penchant for a little bit of macabre composing —
her only other credit for a classic-era Sierra game is King’s Quest III, where she came up with some creepy and/or
mournful themes to depict the evil wizard Manannan and the wretched waif
Gwydion, and it seems like an outtake from those «sessions» was actually used
as the main opening theme in Police
Quest as well — making this one of the weirdest openings, in terms of
atmosphere, for any Sierra game. Seeing as how you don’t actually get to bury
any of your co-workers six feet underground in this game, starting it off to
the sounds of a lo-fi PC speaker funeral march sure provides one with an
inadequate impression, to say the least. Pretty much every single other musical theme is borrowed from elsewhere as well — I think that the final «triumphant» music is simply a sped-up version of the closing fanfares in King’s Quest III, for instance. At least the «Chicken Theme», played when you find a bound chicken on your sergeant’s desk, planted there by the mysterious «Gremlin» prankster, is sensibly borrowed from the old classic ‘Chicken Reel’; later, they would reuse the same melody in Space Quest III for the «Astro Chicken Theme», forever associating it with Roger Wilco instead of Sonny Bonds. (If you don’t care much for traditional Irish fiddle music, you might want to gorge yourself on this hilarious Les Paul interpretation of the theme from the Fifties). There’s also a «Happy Birthday» theme on occasion, a catchy chase sequence which I do not recognize from anywhere, and... that’s pretty much it, I believe, other than occasional pips and squeaks when you open and close your car door and suchlike. Not that it makes Police Quest a particularly bad game, sound-wise — serious discriminatory judgements on Sierra’s music can only be made beginning with the arrival of proper sound cards in 1988 — but given how even the early Space Quest and (especially) Leisure Suit Larry games at least had catchy main themes written for them, it’s clear that in this particular case, nobody really gave the slightest damn. And honestly, I don’t blame them. (In a way, it’s better to have it this way than have to sit through all the corny «police soap»-style muzak of the later games in the series!). |
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Interface
Another cool detail was the ability to use a computer in the PC
Room of your police department — one of the first, if not the first, apparition of a
«computer-within-a-computer» in the history of adventure games? Naturally,
the possibilities were limited — only one search prompt where you could type
in names, phone numbers, license plates etc. — but every once in a while you
could come up with an unpredictable search term and get an unpredictable
result. (Hint: do not forget to input ‘shit’, ‘fuck’, and ‘piss’ the next
time you’re revisiting the game — I’m pretty sure Al Lowe must have been
creeping in at night and leaving his juvenile pranks all over the place!). There were also some useful shortcuts added to the parser, like
the ability to use function keys to quickly get in and out of your car
instead of having to type «get in» and «get out» all the time, or to draw
your gun and shoot (not nearly as useful since, as I already wrote, you only have to draw your weapon once or twice
in the entire game, and you don’t have to shoot even once!), or to call
Dispatch (quite useful, since every
now and then you can lose a bunch of points if you do not report to your
superiors on a regular basis). This did not cover all the bases — for
instance, you still have to type in
‘open door’ and ‘close door’ every single time you deal with your vehicle,
and God forbid you from ever leaving the screen forgetting to close that door! — but at least it did show the
players that the team somehow cared about user-friendliness, in what limited
ways the circumstances allowed them to care. Overall, compared to the frustrating difficulty of mastering the
game controls in some of the other Jim Walls-engineered titles (Codename Iceman — UGH!), Police Quest was pretty decent from a
contemporary point of view. Vehicle navigation was relatively easy, shooting
was a cinch, and the only non-pure-puzzle-based activity that really sucked was, as you have already
guessed, poker. (Never, and I mean never ever, kids, put a game of poker
in an adventure game, unless there’s a scripted way to cheat or at least
unless it doesn’t really matter if you win or lose.) But neither was it
particularly innovative; and as for the parser, this is one of those rare
cases where even I, the world’s biggest fan of parser-based video games,
occasionally get tired of its repetitiveness. Police bureaucracy definitely
agrees better with the point-and-click approach. |
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Out of all the classic Sierra franchises, Police Quest is probably the least often remembered, and you can
see why — not only is this a series whose «moral values» have been shaken to
the core in the progressive era, but it also happens to be the series that,
in full agreement with said values, imposes the most relentless discipline
and punishment on the player... and since girls, uh, gamers just want to have fun, this idea
of replacing cute little puzzles with strict adherence to typing in procedural
phrases quickly died a miserable death. No wonder Jim Walls had so much
trouble with his Kickstarter ideas. That said, I still
insist that Police Quest is not a
bad game — in fact, it’s well worth a spin or two even in its original state (there
would later be a point-and-click remake from Sierra itself, which I hope to
cover separately some day). If you want a really
bad Jim Walls game, play Codename Iceman;
this one, with its cutesy Lytton town and occasional nods to Leisure Suit Larry, still understands
the difference between «disciplining» and «torturing» the player. Additionally,
sometimes it is fun to play a
crime-themed game with such a light tone — no friggin’ «shades of gray», each
and every character a totally one-dimensional stereotype (bring these back! not
all people are really complex and
multi-layered!), and all shall be well if you only just diligently remember
to walk around your car before taking it out of the garage. |
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